Testing is an integral part of post-click marketing. It ensures that pages are as persuasive as possible by seeing what visitors respond to in real-time. Jonghee from JPMorgan Chase tells us how to construct a great testing team.

In this blog post I want to talk about how to organize a Website Testing Team.  I already hear screams from some of you:  ”We don’t even have a single full time person for website testing!” I know, I know. It would be a long way to go if you are in the early stage of website testing. However, once your CEO/CMO falls in love with the results of your first couple of tests and demands running different website tests every month, you will realize one person is not enough to manage and coordinate all the testing efforts. At that point you will want to be prepared to setup a team to run the ever-growing testing engine effectively! I would like to give you an example of web testing team structure, which is working well for me and my team:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Details about each role.

1) Testing Team Lead

This person performs as a project manager. Since every website test is a project with interactions with other teams such as marketing/creative/IT, lots of coordination needs to be taken care of by the project manager; the team lead should have Project Management experience.  It would be great if she has prior Web Analytics/Testing in her background, but it is not required. She can learn Website Testing from her specialized team members.

2) Test Design Professional

This person is in charge of designing the test. Sometimes he needs to “sell” testing ideas to marketing or Line of Businesses with concrete testing ideas. To develop the relevant test plan for the business, he needs to understand the rationale of the current design and suggest alternative ideas to business counterparts.  If he wants to run advanced tests such as Multivariate Testing, he should have solid understanding on statistical concepts behind the advanced testing mechanisms.

3) Analytics Professional

This person works on analyzing data from the test and generates useful insights from the test data. In addition to find out winners and losers,  she will do lots of segmentation to learn more about specific customer behavior around different segments.   She should be very fluent in both Web Analytics Tools (such as Omniture SiteCatalyst,  WebTrends or Google Analytics) and Website Testing Tools (such as Omniture Test & Target, SiteSpect or Google Website Optimizer).  Sometimes she needs to merge different datasets between internal data source and Web Testing data, so SAS/SQL skills also would be very useful. She will also take care of test reporting and final presentation to senior management.

4) Technical (IT) Professional

This person is in charge of implementing managing all the tags from the Web Testing tool.  He will have continuous interaction with Corporate IT to coordinate all the technical issues around the website testing. If there is dedicated resource for testing in your corporate IT, this person might not be needed. However it would be much easier to communicate if he is a part of the testing team.

My guess is that if you are running 20-30 tests a year or running multivariate tests continuously, you will need all four. If you are running simple A/B tests less than once a month, then one person can do both Design and Analytics. This testing team could be part of Marketing, Web Operations or Customer Experience/Usability.

Now it’s your turn.  Have you tried other team structures? What was the benefit/challenge from the structure? Please share your thoughts via comments.

 

blog comments powered by Disqus